The magic backstage

When the curtain falls on a play at the ACTA Theater, the audience has only seen half the show. In the lighting booth and behind the stage, there’s another production that’s just as carefully rehearsed to make the onstage show a success.

“There’s such a choreography backstage as well as on stage; there’s just as much back here,” said Lucy Lunsford, ACTA’s theater manager.

The ACTA (Arts Council of the Trussville Area) Theater began in 1981. Kerry Burrell, ACTA’s technical director and president of the board of directors, said the theater started out with a single summer musical as part of Dog Days each year.

The theater moved into its current building at 225 Parkway Drive — near the library and swimming pool — and now performs five shows per season. Burrell said the plays are family oriented, and they continue the tradition of a summer musical. This summer, the musical was “Seussical,” which wrapped up in July.

Despite the theater’s longevity in the community, Burrell said they continue to meet residents who have no idea it exists.

“We’re kind of hidden back here,” Lunsford said.

Burrell and Lunsford both got their start with ACTA in the spotlight. Burrell started acting in elementary school and learned about ACTA in 1990 while student-teaching at Hewitt-Trussville High School. After that first performance of “Bye Bye Birdie,” he has “been here ever since” and transitioned into the tech director role.

Lunsford also started acting as a child and said her whole family enjoys being in plays, but she first joined ACTA in 2009. She became the manager in June, but also has directed and stage managed for the theater.

“It’s like my home away from home,” Lunsford said.

At a small theater like ACTA, most actors at some point will help move sets, change costumes or other technical aspects. Some actors, like Burrell and Lunsford, find out that they have a real love for the backstage side of things.

“Most people get started in tech work by there not being anyone else available to do it, and if you’re an actor who’s not in the show, you sometimes get roped into doing tech work,” Burrell said.

Carleigh Allen is one of those actors. A Trussville resident and sophomore at Jefferson County Academy of Theater and Dance, Allen’s first acting role was with ACTA in 2008, for a Christmas production of “Miracle on 34th Street.” As she got more involved with the theater, Burrell took Allen under his wing and trained her on all the technical aspects that make a show run.

Now, Allen said being a stage manager — ensuring all the actors and props are in the right place at the right time — is one of her favorite things.

“What you’re doing is not seen by everybody else,” Allen said. “I’m helping someone else create magic on stage, which really makes me happy.”

And there’s a lot that goes into that magic beyond the actors learning their lines. Burrell estimates that he spends 50 hours in total designing and building sets for a play, depending on how complex they are. Those sets also have to work together with the lighting, sound, costumes and scene changes to fit the director’s vision.

“I have met designers who would not attempt to design anything for this space, because we have a very limited space and most designers are accustomed to designing shows for much larger spaces. I like the challenge of creating a set that will fit in our space,” Burrell said.

Once the pieces of the play are created, there are tech rehearsals for four hours or more each night of the week leading up to the performance.

That’s when every element of movement on and off stage is nailed down. It’s critical for the actors to hit their marks behind the curtain, too, down to “this person ties my bow, and I go over here and get this prop from this person,” Lunsford said.

Having managed all the behind-the-scenes elements, Allen said she knows ACTA’s plays are most enjoyable when the audience doesn’t realize the tech crew exists, and when the tension and nervousness backstage never appear in the spotlight.

“People are running around like crazy back there, and no one knows,” Lunsford said.

Allen, Burrell and Lunsford all said that the hardest part of each production isn’t the hours of rehearsals or constructing sets — it’s letting go once they take their final bow.

“You spend six weeks of your life doing the same thing every night, and then it’s over, and you’ve got to wait two weeks for the next one to start,” Lunsford said.

Each play has its own set of memories that, even if they use the script again, can never quite be recaptured. The cast relationships, new friends, inside jokes and even mishaps — Burrell recalled an exploding stage light and his own costume pants ripping onstage as two memorable occasions — create something unique each time.

“With each individual show, you become such a family with however many people are in that cast. And there’s such a rhythm that you create backstage working together, all these random people from all different walks of life — schoolkids to adults to people in their 80s and 90s — and we all work together and we’re all equals. And it’s just amazing,” Lunsford said.

“It’s a magic, like you’ll never come back to just how it was.”

And that’s why two weeks after each play ends, all three of them are eager to get back to the theater again.

“[When] you’re here, you’re not in a bad mood. Someone’s always going to make you happy when you’re here,” Allen said.

ACTA Theater will hold auditions later this month for its October musical, “Snow White.” For more information about auditions and ACTA productions, visit the “ACTA Theater — Trussville’s Community Theater” Facebook page.